Joe crouched behind the pillar. He didn’t dare move closer. This would have to be close enough.
He gestured for Edison to lie down, and the dog flopped down on the broken rocks that underlaid the tracks. Joe stifled his automatic “good boy” and lowered himself next to the dog, making sure that no part of his body stuck out from behind the pillar.
Angling it down toward the ground so that no one could spot the glow, he turned on his laptop and crossed his fingers. The station master’s office on Platform 36 had free Wi-Fi, and that was just what he needed.
Before he had time to log in, the rumble of an approaching train told him that he’d have to wait. Still hidden by the pillar, he hauled Edison up into his lap, and covered them both with the blanket. They waited.
After running next to a moving train, sitting while one passed didn’t seem dangerous at all, just loud and annoying. Funny how he’d changed his assessment of risk with experience. Edison, too, felt more relaxed in his arms.
Once the train passed, he decided to keep the blanket around them. Carefully, he tucked in the corners. It smelled like double dog in his blanket tent, but that couldn’t be helped. He pulled the blanket off his head.
“Baths for both of us when this is over, right, Edison?” he whispered.
Edison refused to meet his eyes. He hated baths and knew the word. Joe grinned. No matter what, some things never changed.
He flipped the laptop open again and tried to connect to the Wi-Fi. One bar. No good. A quick glance around the pillar told him that he didn’t dare move closer. But he had a Wi-Fi booster in his backpack.
It took only a few seconds to set it up and plug it in. He held his breath and tried again. Still too weak.
What if he tried to create a distraction and sneaked onto the platform? Too risky. He could try to sneak back to a subway station — he doubted that the cops had the manpower to cover them all. But he didn’t know of any subway stations that offered Wi-Fi. Another dead-end.
A train approached with a roar, and he pulled the blanket up over his head. Before the blanket covered his eyes, he saw the train’s headlight glint off a discarded beer can, just feet from his position. That should do it.
After the train rumbled into the station, the policeman turned to study the disembarking crowd. Joe took advantage of the distraction and darted out to grab the can.
He upended it. Empty. He popped off the pull tab and dropped it to the stones.
Then he took out his pocketknife and got to work, moving fast so that the noise of the departing commuters covered the sound. First, he sliced off the bottom of the can, impressed at how easily his knife cut through the aluminum. Edison watched, ears up and eyes intent.
Holding the top of the can, Joe stuck the knife just under the thick rim that ran around the top and slit the side from top to bottom. This took some doing, and he wished for a pair of scissors.
Finally, he cut in a circle around the top of the can, under the rim, most of the way around. He left a half-inch section untouched. That should be enough to keep the rest of the can from coming loose in the next step.
Carefully, so as not to cut himself on the sharp edges, he bent the sides of the can outward until the can looked like a miniature radar dish, which he stuck back on top of his Wi-Fi booster.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it might work.
He checked the Wi-Fi again, slowly turning his improvised dish until he picked up a signal. A couple more bars. Strong enough. He grinned at Edison. Who said software guys couldn’t do hardware? To mark the position, he drew a line next to the edge of the dish.
He quickly connected to the Wi-Fi, and took his standard precautions before hacking into the database for the surveillance cameras outside of Grand Central. His years of careful paranoia had paid off. Without his experience at moving unobserved online, he’d have been caught already.
He was going to use this talent to find out who killed Brandon.
He fast-forwarded through the video until he found the time of the attack. Tears sprang into his eyes as he watched the killer crash into Brandon. He was small and slender, with curly dark hair. He didn’t look like a killer.
The man first stepped quickly to the side, as if he had slipped on a patch of ice, seeming to steady himself against Brandon’s back. Even knowing that the man had just stabbed him, Joe could barely see it. The killer stepped away and kept walking. The only thing that separated him from the other walkers was his innate gracefulness, belying the ruse that he had slipped. This was a man whose every movement looked calculated and lithe. A dancer.
Then Brandon collapsed onto the sidewalk. He didn’t even have time to cry out. Just like that, a promising young life was gone.
Brandon had had a girlfriend who worked in PR and didn’t mind a walk in the park instead of a fancy meal, a single mother who had taken on a second job to get Brandon through college, and a little brother who wanted to go to college, too. All of them left behind.
With one hand, Joe stroked Edison’s warm back, both to calm himself and to apologize for what the dog had gone through.
Joe could do nothing to comfort Brandon.
But he could make sure that his killer didn’t walk free.
Another train passed, knocking Joe off the Wi-Fi. He realigned his beer-can booster to his marks and went back to work. His fingers danced across the keyboard as he worked through the footage until he found a good shot of the killer’s face. The man had looked up, past the camera location, toward where Joe had watched him from the tennis club window.
Reflexively, Joe cleaned up the image until it was good enough to result in a match. This was more art than science, but he had practiced with a thousand faces over the months and years it had taken to build the Pellucid software. A seemingly mild-mannered man stared back at him — black hair and dark eyes, a round face, and a high forehead. A Russian ballet dancer.
With a few typewritten commands, Joe had logged in to a backdoor account he’d created in Pellucid at the very beginning. He’d be invisible there, and his movements wouldn’t be logged. Sunil would be furious if he knew — as would the government agencies they worked with. Again, Joe was glad that he had done it. It was as if he’d always known that he’d need a secret entrance someday.
Joe submitted the killer’s picture to a search of the test databases. The company had cloned them early in the process so that their tests didn’t affect the government’s databases in real time. What it meant now was that no one in law enforcement would receive notice of his search. It didn’t take long to get a match. The man who had killed Brandon, and probably Rebar, was Ozan Saddiq.
A commotion on the train platform drew Joe’s attention. He looked cautiously around the pillar to see what was going on. More cops?
The noisemakers were just a group of teenagers, all dressed like old-fashioned barbers — with red-striped vests, red suspenders, and flat straw hats. He did a quick head count, twelve (cyan, blue) kids. Three (red) barbershop quartets. Normal life was going on all around him.
Joe settled back down in front of his laptop, but before he read Ozan Saddiq’s file, he hacked into Torres’s mother’s email account. He used that to send the information off to her daughter — Saddiq’s picture and its source in the surveillance video, complete with time stamps, the picture it had matched in the Pellucid database, and the name Ozan Saddiq. That should be enough to nail the man for Brandon’s murder.
Of course, if she didn’t play her cards right, it was also enough to nail Joe for hacking if they traced it back to him. That didn’t matter. What mattered was bringing Brandon’s killer to justice, and keeping him from killing again. No matter what happened to Joe now, Saddiq was taken care of.